Historical legends of how thousands of Devonians were kidnapped from their coastal villages by Barbary Corsairs in the early 1600s and sold into slavery have been challenged in a new book.
Barbary Corsairs & Devon 1603-1649 charts the turbulent waters of 17th-century England when North African corsairs and renegades - the latter, Europeans who had converted to Islam - waged a holy war at sea against the nascent British Empire.
But the book, researched and written by historian Dr Todd Gray MBE, dismisses as 'myth' the long-held view that corsairs made shore landings as far afield as Fowey, Looe, Padstow, Penzance and Weston-Super-Mare. He also debunks stories that they occupied the Isle of Lundy as a base of operations.
Around 4,000 Devon sailors were estimated to have been snatched at sea - out of a total of 20,000 from England - and Dr Gray said this would have generated rumour and panic that over time became 'fact'.
"Archival research reveals that Devon's corsair history has been widely exaggerated, said Dr Gray, who is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. "Local records prove that while these Barbary marauders targeted the region, dramatic tales of them tearing through Westcountry coastal villages are just highly sensationalised rumours or inventions rather than historical facts."
The corsairs were drawn from a region that encompassed Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, and for several decades they waged a jihad fi'l-bahr (holy war at sea) against the British Empire. They repeatedly targeted English vessels, capturing the crew by force and transporting them to North Africa where they would be sold into slavery.
Dr Gray began researching this field in the late 1980s as part of his doctoral study but returned to it recently with a view to writing the book. Over 18 months, he visited a range of regional archives in Bristol, Taunton, Plymouth, Barnstaple, Redruth and Dorset, as well as the National Archive at Kew and the British Library. He examined state papers, churchwarden accounts, papers from the High Court of Admiralty, and documents in county and borough collections.
Among the more shocking discoveries was a report of a man begging for alms outside a church in Heavitree, Exeter, who had escaped slavery but at the cost of his hands, feet and tongue. But Dr Gray said that his most alarming find was the wealth of historically inaccurate information on the internet - some of which he believes to be AI-generated - to provide a deliberately distorted account of history.
"Writers have spent generations exaggerating accounts of Westcountry raids, ultimately distorting them beyond recognition from the source material," said Dr Gray. "The actual evidence tells a completely different story. The history of the Barbary corsairs does not need to be dramatised; this is a history of the loss of some 4,000 Devon lives and is already more than sufficiently bloodstained and grisly."
